Stories by Chris Bell

Novell&#8217;s acquisition by Attachmate coincides with news the company has added New Zealand staff. New partner executive Robin Hagen and customer account manager David Van Driel recently joined the company and are based in Wellington.

Channel growth is encouraging open source vendor Red Hat to consider establishing a local office next year. Sydney-based Max McLaren, Red Hat&#8217;s ANZ general manager, says growth in its business here would justify the investment but it&#8217;s too early to treat it as definite. &#8220;We&#8217;ve always had aspirations to open an office in New Zealand. It&#8217;s just a question of when.&#8221;

The Ministry of Education is requesting expressions of interest (EOI) from prospective partners to provide support services to TELA, its laptops for teachers scheme. The EOI on the Government Electronic Tenders Service (GETS) website closes on 15 October.

The list of finalists in this year&#8217;s IBM Business Partner Awards, held in association with Reseller News, includes some familiar names. Many are former award winners recognised in 2006, 2007 or 2008; such as Gen-i, Crossware, Integral Technology and Maclean Computing. First-time contenders this year include Cortell, Digiweb, Oxynet, Plan-b and ViFX.

Asia-Pacific location-based services revenue will increase five-fold by 2013, says one analyst firm, partly fuelled by growth in mapping software and services. For those with business intelligence sales skills, the route to new opportunities may be off the chart.

While Retravision&#8217;s business is being wound up, nine of its former stores are rebadging as &#8216;Appliance Spot&#8217;, Appliance Connexion Ltd (ACL)&#8217;s new retail brand. Stores in the 100% chain are also ACL members, and an additional 14 Retravision stores have changed their name to 100%.

Customers hoping to buy a $1 iPod were left frustrated when 3deals launched its website on 12 May. From the go-live the site was inaccessible to many internet users for around 25 minutes, with web browsers returning &#8216;page not found&#8217; errors. When the site came back up the iPods were sold out.

IT security vendor Sophos says the global launch of its new partner programme offers a two-tier margin structure; enhanced vendor support, as well as new deal registration and margin protection initiatives. The programme, says Sophos, has been designed specifically to deliver business growth for dedicated partners, strengthening their market position.

Writing a news story for this issue about three resellers settling with Microsoft after selling counterfeit versions of the company&#8217;s software got me thinking. My research took me beyond the confines of the cases in the news.

Adam Baldwin has replaced Bruce Thierbach as Auckland-based general manager of JB Hi-Fi, which also owns the electrical chain Hill &amp; Stewart. Baldwin was previously in a Sydney-based role with the company.

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